The sociology of flows as critique of capitalism: Mapping alternative flows of organizing

The ways in which the (re)current economic crises are enacted by
academics has several important implications for the ontological
politics of capitalism: first, politically inclined debates tend to
polarize capitalism by essentializing it as either univocally good
or bad. Second, ethical debates, which revert to higher ideals such
as responsibility, justice or equality, reveal a tendency to
individualize and humanize the current crises by focusing on
respectively the misdeeds of concrete culprits or individual vices
such as greed, self-interest, and competitiveness. Third, experts in
financial affairs economize capitalism by depicting it as being
primarily or exclusively a matter of (speculative) financial
transactions. Though it would be wrong to assume that these
perspectives are entirely misguided, they do indeed offer only a
partial understanding of capitalism – particularly what
concerns questions pertaining to whether capitalism can or how it
should be transformed. Consequently, in this contribution, we revert
to the sociology of flows to augment the critique of capitalism. To
this end, we use the work of, among others, Urry, Mol, Rifkin, and
Appadurai to conceptualize capitalism as a relational phenomenon
constantly being (re)constituted through multiple, distributed and
yet interconnected human, technical, ideological, iconic and
financial flows. The sociology of flows, the argument goes, is
instrumental for (a) moving away from individual-focused and
systemic theories, for (b) tackling capitalism’s inherent
paradoxes as inter alia materialized in its dialectic of flow and
closure, homogeneity and heterogeneity, and for (c) grasping its
material disjunctures (e.g. socio-economic inequalities). Whilst
suggesting that academic theorizing of capitalism needs to be
expanded beyond economic operations, we move to the peripheries of
the capitalist fabric so as to address the possibility of
“alternatives”. Conceptualizing
“alternatives” as socio-material (re)assemblings
performed by communities-of-alternative-practices, we illustrate our
deliberations through cases which transgress the status quo by
inventing novel flows, by re-appropriating existing flows, or by
combining existing flows in unprecedented ways.

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